"Nice, on the thirtieth day of August in the year 1559.
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. Shadows from the city's smoke and tamed flames, shadows from the people who inhabited it and their abandoned lives. It's where at night repressed desires and abandoned dreams become shadows - if you're lucky - or monsters - if you're not - from Dante's Inferno. It's because that night I too had become a shadow - hollow - without memories, without consciousness, only with a light aura of absurdity, which only those who have narrowly escaped death experience. It was a night full of shadows.
I approached the sea. The dark Mediterranean was also a shadow of its once brilliant self. She had sunk into her up to her chest. Invisible to those who have no eyes, she had undressed and let the water soak her, asking for atonement. I also approached, like a shadow, quietly - I seemed to have sunk into the strangest dream. She turned to me.
"Eleanor," I whispered, not knowing what else to say to her.
To her who was everything to me, I only managed to say her real name.
"A thousand and one nights," he whispered more towards the night and the sea.
So long during the day I lived with the thought of her, at night I told her fairy tales. How dare I think I would live like this forever?
"They passed, Marie," she continued. "On the thousand and second night, Scheherazade has no more stories to tell, and the Persian king beheads her. This is how your story should end! By death!", he was now almost shouting. "This is how it should end so it's not just a fairy tale!"
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. A thousand and one nights I made love to her. And now the hourglass was empty, as time empties our lives. I looked for a quiver in her voice, a tremor. A trace of emotion of fear or agitation. I didn't find anything. Her voice was hard and unruffled, her eyes were dry and her gaze pure. She wasn't afraid, she wasn't sad, she wasn't shocked, she wasn't angry. She was determined. She had come to terms with her shadows.
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. The shadows of the city had now faded. But it was always the shadows of people that scared me. The voice of those we did not say, the works of those we did not act, the shadows of our other selves – our shadows.
I got even closer. Her firm skin under the dim night light awakened in me a sense of omnipotence.
"I have conquered death!", I shouted each time before I touched it.
But tonight my enemy was not death, but my envious shadow.
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. She turned to the sea again. I stood looking at her, as if I was looking for my own consciousness, which I had just lost, at that moment. As if I didn't exist, she didn't care, but with her silence she made me believe that this is what she wanted from me - my invisible presence in the silent mystagogy. She pulled her hands out of the water, stretching them toward the sky in a liberating gesture. Because heaven is the most common recipient of both our hatred, frustration and anger, as well as joy, vitality and liberation. It is as if man wanted to be born an eagle, but he was deprived of this human canopy and his gloomy shadow - which on nights like this does not stand out from his real face.
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. In her right hand she clutched a knife. And she came to the surface even more and stood proudly showing off her feminine nature in the unyielding shadows that demand emotions to feed on. Her skin radiated love, her body lust, her belly tenderness, her breasts pleasure, her face youth, her hair… her hair had been left free in the night, long down to her waist, that exquisite finishing touch to the most precious work of art. In her right hand she clutched a knife. She deftly twisted it with her palm, marking herself. I, too, was delighted to gaze upon that brilliant mystery without perceiving her rapid movements except at the last moment.
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. In her right hand she clutched a knife. A knife like a weapon against what he was allowed to love and what he now hated again with fury. Against all that she was allowed to enjoy to pay for it now with the deepest silence of her loneliness. Against lust, lust, her feminine nature, the weak, the unprotected. Against the beautiful, the beautiful, the pleasure and the pleasure of the mind and the flesh. Towards peaceful life, peace, happiness and love. Against devotion and love. Against trust. In the face of everything she believed in and now she was so deeply betrayed. He brought the knife down with the speed and precision of a hardened assassin. Only then did I understand. Only then did I react. I jumped forward and tried to catch her hand as she came down. But then it was too late."
It was a night full of shadows. The thousand and second night. The shadows of the city had faded. It was the time of those people. I looked up at the sky and saw that she had once again achieved the impossible. He had managed to fly. Her long black hair had risen up there, where no man can reach, but only his calculation. They had begun their long journey in the wind, taking with them all that she did not want, because she considered them too much to carry. Some stumbled across the Mediterranean, floated by my hand, but I hesitated to collect them, as if they were sacred relics - who am I to desecrate them?
The thousand and second night had arrived. She turned to me. He raised the knife again and realized it had begun. He looked up and looked at me. Restless, determined. Her hair no longer differed in length from mine. I looked at her too. In my eyes she looked just as beautiful.
"Poor, my love," I thought, but kept quiet. "Do you really think you're going to stifle the wonderful like that?"
It was the thousand and second night. He had arrived. And she stood in front of me proudly having declared her decision.
"Symbolism is always of great importance," I taught in another life, in another world.
And now I couldn't do it. She wanted to end what we lived. I had to respect her decision. I held out my hand to her and she gave it to me. I squeezed it and looked into her eyes.
"I'm with you," I wanted to tell her, but it wasn't necessary.
She understood. He smiled faintly and nodded gratefully for the understanding.
On the thousand and second night, I had no other tale to tell her. And she renounced me, returning to her own world, where love was just another fairy tale, which she did not want to hear again. A fairy tale with an inglorious ending. And I just stood motionless surrounded in the sea of her black hair, which I thought was gold in the waves of shadows and illusions of that dark night. Scheherazade had fallen silent. All you could hear now was the rustling of her shadow. And I, who had no other life, saw her disappearing into the sea, slipping from my hands - like a shadow - while I stood and sunk in my resignation in silence.
In the thousand and second night, there was no other tale to be told."
"The History of Shadows"
Thomas Kalokiris
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